Naberushkina E. K. Disability in the focus of urban feminism, p. 142-155


The research focus of the article is defined by three scientific categories — gender, urbanism, disability. The issues of ensuring the sustainable development of the city and its territories are considered: satisfying the needs and rights to space for various groups of people, cre-ating such a friendly and open environment that responds promptly to these requirements and, if necessary, easily changes, reshapes or adapts to new conditions and functions. The paper uses the focus of urban feminism as a new interdisciplinary research field that has emerged to encourage the integration of gender perspectives in urban development policies. We proceed from the fact that the stigma of a woman with a disability is not equal to the stigma of a woman and the stigma of a disabled person. This is a border zone, parallel citizenship, which, implemented in a large city, acquires special features of uniqueness. The analysis undertaken in this work is based on three main points: life in urban conditions provides women with disabilities with many advantages, but it also involves a whole range of problems that a big city creates; what cognitive skills develop among residents depends on what the surrounding world is created in the urban system; the daily experience of women with disabilities opens up a parallel city. Interviewing 20 women with visible signs of disability made it possible to draw a number of conclusions: the identified problems and psychological frustrations of girls with disabilities are not purely personal, they are rooted both in the field of stereotypes and stigma, and in models of the gender order of society; assistance for citizens with disabilities is built into the working matrix of ideas about femininity and masculinity; the figure of a woman with a disability evokes behavior and emotions associated with sociocultural codes of inter-sexual relations, but more often the urban space is produced in the discourse and emotions of sympathy and the provision of feasible assistance that is differently constructed in the upper and lower social layers; in the field of female disability, two dichotomous images of foreign ethnic men are recorded in the city (the first — “they are a source of danger”, the second — “they are more tolerant of women with disabilities”); all the fears of women regarding their physicality in the city are associated with three characteristics of space — supervision, accessibility, and the fullness of space by diverse groups. In the context of urban acquaintances, girls with disabilities typologize men oriented to: 1) neutral friendly communication; 2) for a serious relationship in connection with the feeling of the severity of his own life and the desire to find a frivolous woman who understands the cost of partnership; 3) those who deny any opportunity to interact with women with disabilities due to internal fears, stereotypes, and self-awareness of their own status. Women with disabilities, more often than men, face gross violations of their personal space due to unwillingness to engage in interactions, which are often presented under the guise of assistance.
read in PDF>>>